A phrase from Faust's monologue in the first scene of Goethe's Urfaust.

4

See especially the impressive country-by-country survey in S.U. Larsen and B. Hagtvet (eds), Modern Europe after Fascism, New York, Columbia University Press, 1998.

5

One of the best surveys of the conceptual complexities posed by the term 'right' is still R. Eatwell (ed.), The Nature of the Right, London, Pinter, 1989.

6

See, for example, the debate over the comparative value of the terms 'fascism' and 'radical right', in D. Prowe, '"Classic" fascism and the new radical right in Western Europe: comparisons and contrasts', Contemporary European History, November 1994, Vol. 3, pp. 289-313. For another perspective on the word-field associated with the radical right, see Herbert Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis, Ann Arbor MI, University of Michigan Press, 1995, Chapter 1.

For a fuller account, see the 'General introduction' to R. Griffin, International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, London, Arnold, 1998. The latest (unwitting) convert to the consensus is A.J. Gregor, as shown in his latest book on generic fascism, Phoenix, New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 1999, in which he refers to it as a 'tortured, enraged, and passionate demand for national renewal' (p. 162). For independent corroboration of the existence of this necessarily partial and contested consensus, see Stanley Payne's review article, 'Historical fascism and the radical right', Journal of Contemporary History, 2000, Vol. 35, pp. 109-11.

The only real exception to this generalization is the explosion of radical right groups both extra-systemic (some fascist) and others ostensibly democratic (ethnocratic), which took place in Russia in the 1990s. Though safely marginalized by the system, the sheer variety of them and the dramatic, though predictably short-lived, rise to international prominence of Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party underline the dependency on conditions of acute systemic crisis for radically palingenetic and ethnocratic forms of the right to achieve a popular resonance. Even in post-unification Germany and pre-democracy South Africa the radical right, though violent, remained safely marginalized, because in both cases populist palingenetic hopes for the rebirth of the country were projected onto liberal democracy/capitalism and channelled within the parliamentary system.

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